fractal swirl

Author Comments

I don't know if this is worthy of being on Newgrounds. In a sense it's not even something I made, it's something my computer made, I just wrote the program it ran to make it. But the bigger question is, is it useful for anything? It's 6 different fractals, each using a more or less random generating function, each getting the primary and secondary colors of light, then added on top of each other, passed through a high pass 2-d filter, and then swirled. I tried to make an animated version of it, where the generating functions' parameters vary by a random walk in each successive frame, but then when I tried to run this program, my whole computer died! The hard drive was unreadable and it couldn't find windows (I got my stuff back because it worked in an external enclosure that connected through a USB connection) and even the motherboard and all my peripherals died! Wow. Talk about poison right there. Frigging windows vista, windows xp would never have done that. But here is one particular set of random functions and one particular amount of swirling. I like how the "8" appeared in the middle got swirled. It's good as a computer desktop background. I was using it as one. On the computer that died.

Make SURE to (not only have matlab on your computer but also) have loads of RAM on your computer. The one that crashed my computer (the real downfall is probably that I told it to delete all but the most recent system restore copies to free up hard drive space so the pagefile would have more space WHILE it was already running) that generates a series of frames with random parameters:

https://www.mediafire.com/?i8fdd9vogngttf5

I could have saved some RAM in that, because it doesn't do the rotation, but it still does what the earlier version did: it calculates the fractal over a larger area than the final frame, so that it can rotate it in a circle and only keep the final inscribed rectangle (so it does more than it needs to do and also wastes some processing power, since it only keeps the rectangle inscribed in the circle inscribed in the original rectangular area and that's not necessary if it's not being rotated) but I didn't want to change the number of pixels because that would change the brightness of the image as it involves a 2-d fourier transform and I didn't remember whether I set it up in such a way that it would be twice as bright if half the size or not. The original was done on my 1 GB RAM XP computer and the catastrophic failure on my 512 MB RAM Vista computer. Naturally if I had known what would happen I would have just put one of the 512 RAM sticks from the one computer into the other and saved a whole lot of pain and misery.

You can also see the animation that comes about from the rotation of the fractal to various degrees here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnIIAXU10aU

The image you see here is simply frame #138 in that. You'll see the number hard-coded into the program in the first link, but it used to be a for loop that went from 0 to something like 300 or so, 138 was just my favorite, but you can change that number 138 in the code to something else to rotate it different amounts (the swirl effect in the middle).

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